Inferring additional knowledge from QTCN relations

It is widely held that people tend to use qualitative rather than quantitative phrases when raising or answering questions about moving objects. Queries about whether an object is moving towards or away from another object or whether objects are getting closer to each other or further away from each other, require qualitative responses. This characteristic should be reflected in a calculus to be used to describe and reason about continuously moving objects. In this paper, we present a qualitative trajectory calculus of relations between two disjoint moving objects, whose movement is constrained by a network. The proposed calculus (QTCN) is formally introduced and illustrated. Particular attention is placed on how to infer additional knowledge from QTCN relations by means of composition tables and the transformation of QTCN relations into relations defined by the Relative Trajectory Calculus on Networks (RTCN).